Perspective

I went to lunch today at my usual place where I am known but no one bothers me. I am after all playing the role of a recluse. So I sit with my glass of wine with my journal open doing my writing. It’s quiet, no ones pays any attention to me. As usual, this has been going on since France and those are the French.

I am sitting there and I may add it’s a mostly a queer place which of course is why I am there, all straight chicks love to go to gay hangouts, safer, anyway so I am sitting there having lunch doing my writing and in walks an old woman, in her 80’s.

She comes in and everyone knows her name, her name is Grace. She sits down and they get her coffee and she starts looking around, as everyone had called her by name I did the same and she got up and came over and sat with me. We started talking you know as women do…

She had an interesting life. She had an invalid for a father and told her mother she was not marrying to be someone’s slave so she was heading out and she joined the foreign service and spent her life over seas, she never married choosing to be alone. So I said to her, ” Grace how do you do it, stay alone all the time”, she told me she has always been alone so she always goes out to be around people. I told her it was hard for me after so many years to be so alone.

This is what she said, all of her family is dead now, her mother father brothers, she has no one left but a cousin she rarely sees, her phone never rings, she is friends with her mailman and walks through the park when the weather is nice. So she told me I am not to say that I was lonely any more, she said if I have family then I am not alone, I tear up while I write this because this woman has been living alone all her life and is alone in the twilight of her life and she is fine but she also knew that not having a husband or children would leave her alone at some point but she pointed out I was not alone, even though I am alone I am not alone because they are out there sometimes thinking of me.